EDIT: Submarine power transportation is indeed on the list
Not transoceanic, but there are two projects currently proposed that will – when constructed – break the current record for the “longest undersea power transmission cable” (a record currently held by the North Sea Link at 720 km, or 450 miles.)
One of these projects is the Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project which aims to lay 3,800 km (2,400 miles) of cable and sell Morocco’s solar power to England.
There is, as of yet, not enough cable in the world to even begin this project. The company proposing the project is building factories to produce this cable.
The other is the Australia-Asia Power Link, which aims to provide Australian solar power to Singapore using a 4,500 km (2,800 miles) undersea cable.
Where the Xlinks project ran into a “not enough cable in the world” problem, Sun Cable’s AAPL has apparently been running into a “not enough money in the world” problem, as it has repeatedly gotten into trouble with its investors.
EDIT: But also, storage is scaling up
@[email protected] provided a fantastic link to a lot of energy storage mediums that are already in use in various grids across the world. These include (and the link the professor provided gives an excellent short summary on each)
- Pumped hydroelectric
- Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES)
- Flywheels
- Supercapacitors
- And just plain batteries
Also, this wasn’t in the Gumby’s answer, but Finland’s Vatajankoski power plant uses a hot sand battery during its high-demand, low-production hours.
Hydrogen is projected to grow
@[email protected] noted that hydrogen has advantages no other energy storage medium possesses: duration of storage and ease of piping/shipping. This is probably why numerous governments are investing in hydrogen production, and why Wood Mackenzie projects what looks like a 200-fold increase in production by the year 2050. (It’s a graph. I’m looking at a graph, so I am only estimating.)
The statistic you’re looking for is energy density. It’s usually expressed as Watthour per kilo(Wh/kg). Li-ion batteries are somewhere around 300Wh/kg, or about 1 megajoule though less if you’re making it into a building.
Lifting a big weight provides you with Mass x 9.81 x Height amount of joules. So lifting 1 kg for 100m gives you 1x10x100~ 1 kilojoule.
So, to charge my 300kg, 32.000 Wh Nissan leaf battery (130Wh/kg, what you get when you actually build batteries in the real world), you would need to lift a mass of 115tons to 100 meters. So to charge a single car, at 100% efficiency, you need to lift 72 entire cars. Just so I can drive to work and back. And real-world efficiency is far below 100%, just think of the friction.
I think you’ve spotted the reason why we don’t actually build gravity batteries. Imagine lifting 115 tons to 100m, that requires a massive crane, itself weighting nearly half that. That’s why all gravity storage in existence basically consists of pumping water uphill, onto pre-existing mountains and lakes that nobody had to fabricate out of concrete and steel.
There’s a company in the UK that proposes building gravity batteries using existing shafts that were excavated for mining.